(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a tambour door wherein the door, when in use, gives a solid appearance, and more particularly may include a design which is pressed or stamped into the tambour door face surface. The tambour door of the present invention has a wood composition board core with at least a veneer face surface.
(b) Description of the Prior Art
In the manufacture of heretofore known tambour doors, small strips of wood having tapered, chamfered, or rounded edges are placed in a touching relation and are held together by adhesively securing these pieces of wood to a flexible backing material, usually cloth. Generally, tambour doors are assembled from a random selection of wood strips cut from wood panels. And, the wood panels themselves are cut from different parts of a log. Therefore, the wood grain and color of adjacent wood strips do not match. The transversely extending grooves in these tambour doors formed by the tapered chamfered or rounded edges of the individual strips is, therefore, necessary to mask or disguise the mismatching grains and color of the wood strips. The resulting sheet which includes a plurality of transversely extending grooves thereacross, has been used for many years in roll-top desks, flexible-type closures for entertainment centers, and similar type applications.
In our U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,060,705 and 5,066,080, we teach a tambour door with a solid appearance and a method for making the solid appearance tambour door. In those patents, a tambour door is described which is made from a plurality of rectangular-shaped members. These members are fabricated of, for example, solid wood, hard board, and wood laminated fiberboard. A design is formed in the face surface of the plurality of adjoining members by routing, carving, pressing, and the like. With a laminated type tambour door, designs can not be routed or carved, because doing so would pierce the laminated surface and leave the unattractive interior substrate core exposed, which is not desirable. Pressing can tear the thin laminates and cause the same problem, unless the pressing is controlled to a preselected pressure or depth into the laminated tambour door.